Advertising is an established way for merchants to reach an audience of potential customers. Ideally, merchants desire to have their advertisements directed to individuals that are likely to purchase the merchants' products and services. Accordingly, advertising has gone through an evolution of targeting approaches. Initially, advertising was often generally untargeted. However, over time, merchants began to target potential customers in a number of ways. For instance, merchants often target a particular audience by selectively choosing the medium (e.g., newspapers, magazines, radio, television, etc.) in which to advertise. Additionally, advertising is often targeted by selecting the particular context (e.g., specific shows on television, specific web pages on the Internet, etc.) within which the advertisements will appear.
Online advertising has become a significant aspect of computing environments, as it presents a powerful way for advertisers to market their products and services. For instance, online advertising is often more likely to allow advertisers to effectively deliver advertisements to their target audiences as compared with traditional media advertising, such as newspapers, magazines, and radio. Additionally, there are a variety of advertising systems and methods for delivering online advertisements for presentation to users.
One form of online advertising includes presenting an advertisement within an electronic document, such as a web page, served by a content server to a user device. The web page may include an area for presenting an advertisement. When an end user requests a web page from a content server, an advertising delivery system may select an advertisement for presentation within the area provided by the web page. Each presentation of an advertisement within a web page is referred to as an impression.
Advertising delivery systems often select advertisements for delivery and presentation within a web page using an auction process. In particular, advertisers establish advertisement campaigns on the advertising delivery system. Each advertisement campaign includes an advertisement that may be delivered for presentation on web pages and bid price settings that are used for advertisement selection purposes. The bid price settings may reflect one or more payment models. For instance, the bid price settings may comprise a cost-per-impression price that reflects an amount an advertiser is willing to pay for presentation of an advertisement. As another example, the bid price settings may comprise a cost-per-performance price that reflects an amount the advertiser is willing to pay for performance of some action by the end user (e.g., clicking on the advertisement or purchasing the advertiser's product or service). The auction process comprises comparing bid prices associated with competing advertisement campaigns and selecting the advertisement campaign having the highest bid price and/or the advertisement campaign determined likely to generate the highest advertising revenue for that impression. Other approaches for selecting advertisements (e.g., priority-based) for a given impression may also be employed by advertising delivery systems.
As noted above, bidding on impressions is typically done based on advertisement campaign pre-settings. In other words, the bid price settings associated with advertisement campaigns are fixed by the advertiser when the advertisement campaign is established. As can be expected, this provides a particularly rigid approach to targeting advertisements to end users. In some instances, some flexibility may be provided by configuring an advertisement campaign to target specific types of users. For instance, an advertisement campaign may be configured to only bid for impressions for end users that have previously visited a particular website. However, this approach still limits the ability to dynamically add and/or remove specific users from a particular advertisement campaign. Additionally, it does not enable the advertiser to vary the bid price of particular advertisement campaigns for specific users. Some additional bidding approaches are currently available that allow differential bidding based on impression characteristics but are typically limited in capabilities.